


On The Jazz

by nik_knows_nothing



Category: Leverage, The A-Team (TV)
Genre: Gen, Minor Alec Hardison/Parker, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 19:54:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17351582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: "What are we gonna do when this thing's over? I mean, what are we really qualified to do?""Go after thugs in the park?""And outlawed motorcycle gangs, organized crime figures...why, there's a world of slimeballs out there!""I knew it. I just knew you had a plan.""Comforting, isn't it?"(Or, years and years after everything else, there's an old couple sitting in the corner of the diner.)





	On The Jazz

**Author's Note:**

> Because Face and Amy totally deserved better than Melinda Culea getting shunted off the show, and also A-Team and Leverage were both Way Too Formative for me not to make a crossover thing, so here we are.
> 
> Also, I know less than nothing about anything computer-y, and it really, really shows.

The bell over the door chimes as they push their way into the restaurant.

Hardison watches as Elliott does a sweep of the clientele, wants to roll his eyes, and then thinks better of it, since it’s probably better for the mission that he remain with all bones unbroken.

But, seriously, come on.

They’re out a bit from the city, anyways, in one of those neighborhoods that’s a little too nice to be considered suburbia, where all the high-ranking managers and office-dwellers and stuff like that come to relax during the summer or something.

Office-dwellers from ValCorp, for example.

Where they just got kicked out of.

A localized frequency burst just about knocked their earbuds out of commission until Hardison can fiddle with them for a little bit—“I thought you said these things were foolproof!” Elliot had snarled—and their attempt to get on Valentine’s schedule was a complete bust.

So, now, they’re getting food.

You know, for morale.

And it’s not like the sandwich shop is crammed with dangerous-looking types.

You’ve got your high school idiots by the window, some older couple by the wall, businessmen at the counter, and a few scattered couples at tables on the black and white checked floor.

But Elliott does his little peripheral sweep thing, anyway.

The girl behind the counter’s got her hair in a ponytail, and it makes Hardison think of Parker—but then again, pretty much everything makes him think about Parker.

He focuses in time to place an order (turkey, Swiss, rye, and cranberry), and Elliott gives him a weird look, but, hey, this sandwich is going to be awesome.

And they take a booth by the wall.

“Cranberry,” Elliott says, as they sit. “The hell’s wrong with you?”

“Oh, what, man, like you never had turkey with cranberry sauce?”                

“Not in the middle of summer, I haven’t.”                

“Well, excuse me, Mr. Only-eats-turkey-on-Thanksgiving. We can’t all be so picky.”

Elliott just shakes his head and unwraps his own sandwich.

“Okay,” he says. “So what’s the deal, huh? What happened to the unbeatable earbuds that nobody else had? How’d they get knocked out so easy?”

“I don’t know, it’s called being hyper-paranoid and crazy-suspicious. You might be able to tell me how that feels.”

“We’re not talking about me, Hardison, we’re talking about the fact that we couldn’t even do a simple information run on this guy without getting bounced back.”

Hardison bristles. “Why’re you saying that like it’s my fault?”

“It’s no one’s fault, alright? But right now, we can’t even get a face-to-face with this guy, let alone get close enough to run a game on him!”

“Alright, ease up, there, Cujo.” Hardison makes little _down_ motions over the table, and Elliott scowls. “It’s no big deal, I’m sure Sophie is already wining and dining her way into his inner circle as we speak, it’s no big thing.”

“I don’t like it,” Elliott grumbles.

“Neither do I, but that’s how she rolls.”

“No, I mean—I don’t like how we got nothing on this guy.”                

Of course, Hardison likes that even less.

“I’m working on it,” he says, a little guiltily.

“Why doesn’t this guy exist?” Elliott pushes, doing that weird voice where he’s talking to himself more than he’s talking to Hardison. “Why can’t we find him anywhere?”

“He’s got to be _somewhere_ ,” Hardison reasons, because, obviously, everybody has to be _somewhere_ , unless somehow there was a death certificate he missed, which he really, really doesn’t find to be all that likely.

“Well, yeah, I mean—” Elliott huffs out a breath through his nose, which is his usual way of showing that he’s getting exasperated.

Over at the window, one of the kids spills his drink across the table, and his buddies all roar with laughter at his mistake.

If the girl behind the counter rolls her eyes any harder, there’s a real danger of them rolling right out of her head.

“He’s not in his office.”

“No, he is not.”

“He’s not at his home—Parker’s staked out there for hours.”

“Right.”

“And any bug you can cook up is going to be fried by the grid on his driveway the second it touches his wheels.”

“That’s not actually how the grid works—”

“And he’s flanked by guards even when he drives, so no chance of trailing him to and from—too far out for the cameras to pick up—”           

“Alright, I get the point!” Hardison snaps.

Elliott raises his eyebrows.

“I get the point.”                

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re just saying.”

“I am.”

“Yeah, I get it, you complain, it’s your thing.”                

“It’s not my thing,” Elliott says, but he looks smug.

Hardison finishes half of his sandwich, licks the cranberry sauce off his hand, and twists the napkin around and around.

Because, as much as it pains him to admit it, the guy’s got a point.

They’ve never failed a client yet, but each time they run into a barrier like this, Hardison can’t help but wonder _what if?_

What if this time’s the first?

What if, this time, they can’t do it?

That’s ridiculous. Of course they can.

“Look, man, we’ll get to him,” he says, trying to convince himself as well as his friend. “Nate’ll come up with something. We’re not going back to the Marshalls empty-handed.”

Elliott, true to character, doesn’t answer.

“No, I mean it,” Hardison says, warming to his topic. “Man, Valentine is nothing compared to the guys we usually take down—”

“Be quiet,” Elliott says.

“I’m serious. I mean—Moreau? Dubenich? Morrison?—next to them, Valentine’s nothing—”

“Hardison, stop talking.”

“No, man, I am not going to let your constant pessimism get to me, okay? I mean—”

“Hardison, _shut up!”_

Startled, Hardison actually shuts up.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks, after a moment of silence.

“The couple by the window,” Elliott says, barely moving his mouth at all. “They’re listening in on our conversation.”                

Hardison tries to remember who he’s talking about. He’s sitting with his back to the couple in question, so it takes him a moment, but then he remembers.

It’s the old couple—well, not _old_ , old, but, like, late fifties.

He laughs, but keeps it quiet.

“So, what are they going to do?”                

“They’re trouble.”

Elliott’s using his _very serious business_ voice, but it’s still a little hard to take him seriously when he’s talking about a man and woman who are somewhere between the ages of Nate and Archibald Freaking Leach.

“They’re a sweet old couple on a date,” Hardison says. “What do you mean, they’re trouble?”

“Ex-military.”

“Ex-military. Oh. Okay. Wow. Now I’m _real_ scared. So is, what, like, a third of the country? Come on, man—”

“ _Special. Forces.”_ Elliott is hissing the words through his teeth, and a few diners glance their way, but the man and woman in question seem almost determined not to notice.

Hardison stares hard at his sandwich.

Okay, so maybe they aren’t so sweet.

“Alright,” he says. “So the guy used to be some crazy Jason Bourne prototype when he was young, fifty years ago. So?”

“Did you get a look at his hands?” Elliott raises his eyebrows. “Huh? Did you see those scars? The man’s done time in a military prison. Da Nang, I’d say, by the looks of it. Probably ‘round the end of the Vietnam War.”

This is too much.

“You can tell all that from—”

But Elliott’s eyes are getting dangerously twitchy.

“Right, sorry. Very distinctive scars.” Hardison waves a hand. “Please. Continue.”

“And the woman? She’s a reporter. Won four Pulitzer prizes in her first fifteen years.”

“Man, how do you _know_ this stuff?”

“I just do, alright?” Elliot jerks a hand through his hair. “I’m telling you, they’ve been listening.”                

“Alright,” says Hardison again. “So they’ve been listening. So? That doesn’t have to mean that they know anything.”

Except the old couple choose that exact second to stand up.

Not that Hardison would have known, of course, except for the fact that Elliott hisses, “They’re up. They’re heading this way.”

The lady’s shoes click on the floor, and Hardison can hear the man’s footsteps, too, albeit much quieter—and then both stop short.

“ _So_ sorry to interrupt,” says a voice, just over his left shoulder. “But I couldn’t help overhearing the name _Valentine._ ”

Hardison glances up and gets his first good look at the man.

He’s been expecting some grizzled, Liam Neeson-looking type, like the way Elliott will probably look in another thirty years.

Instead, the man looking down and smiling benignly is wearing a three piece suit. His hair is neatly combed, his watch looks expensive, and the coat tucked over his arm looks even more so.

He looks, Hardison realizes with a chill, like—Starke, wasn’t it?—that other grifter that Sophie used to run with, the one that nearly got her killed by hiring Chaos.

Yeah, he looks a lot like him.

Except this guy sort of gives off the vibe like he could throw Starke a hundred yards, if the going got rough enough.

The woman doesn’t look like Sophie, or the woman Starke had with him in his crew. If anything, she reminds Hardison of Maggie, Nate’s ex-wife—the same friendly, trusting, open kind of face, and girl-next-door kind of good looks, even as an older woman.

She’s dressed nice, too, and, together, they look like a nice, upper-class couple, maybe a year or so from retirement, the kind that go and visit their grandkids ever summer before flying back to their house in some neighborhood with a name that sounds like a Regency novel.

Except they don’t, because their grins are just a little too sharp, eyes just a little too keen for them to be ordinary Muggles like that.

And they’re still waiting for a response.

“Valentine?” Elliott tries, but it’s a weak try, at best. “I don’t—what—I don’t…I didn’t say anything about…did you, Hardison?”

Hardison shakes his head.

“Oh, gee, that’s too bad,” says the man, and turns to his date. “Isn’t that too bad?”

“Too bad,” says the lady, in an overly sympathetic tone. “Because, I mean, if you _had_ been talking about Valentine—”

“And you did, in fact, mean _the_ Patrick Valentine,” the man puts in.

“—then it would have sounded an awful lot like you were sort of running into a wall when it comes to finding him.”

They don’t respond.

“Like maybe you were planning on taking him down,” she presses. “Wasn’t that how it sounded to you, too?”

“That’s exactly it,” says the old man. “At least, that’s how it sounded to me.”

Elliott and Hardison exchange glances.

The two sound for all the world like just a harmless, babbling couple—but something about the way they cut over each other and smile through their words gives off the feeling that this, or something very much like this, is something they've done a billion times.

In another life, maybe, Hardison thinks.

“Well, we’re not,” he says, and it might be a little rude, but he’s not so great under pressure, okay? “We’re, just, uh, talking about something we read online. No way is anyone taking down Patrick Valentine any time soon.”

And he shoots a look at Elliott, feeling smug and quite confident on this point.

Elliott, predictably, glares.

But the man just _tsk, tsk, tsks_ , and shakes his head, like he’s going to say something old-fashioned, like _that’s a crying shame._

“Oh, that’s a _crying_ shame,” says the man.

But he says it in a sort of sarcastic way, so it doesn’t sound quite as old-fashioned as Hardison was hoping for.

                “Because if you _were_ planning on taking down Patrick Valentine— _the_ Patrick Valentine, that is—and you really were having a hard time getting to him past the security in his office—”

Here the man trails off, and shrugs in an obnoxiously superfluous manner.

“Well, then,” he says, easy as you please. “If that were the case, I’d, ah, I’d try to bump into him when he’s at his club.”

Hardison stares.

And then, in spite of himself, he hears himself saying—

“But Valentine doesn’t go to a club.”

The lady frowns. “Oh, dear, are you sure about that?”

“Uh…” Pretty darn, anyhow. “Yeah. No payments of any sort.”

“Well, of course not, no, there wouldn’t be, would there?” asks the man. “He’s been going to that place to golf for, oh, a lot longer than—well, when did computers start being a thing? Eighties? Nineties? A lot longer than that.”

No. No, they would have found something. A credit card slip—

“We would have found something,” Elliott says. “A credit card slip—”

But the lady’s shaking her head, earnest.

“He’s too old for that, don’t you see? Paid cash, years and years ago, so there’s no record in the computer today.”

But the street cameras—

“No cameras that far out, either,” says the man. “So, see, if you _were_ looking to get on his schedule, I’d, ah, I’d really recommend trying there.”

Neither have given the name of this club, if the club actually exists.

Hardison somehow doesn’t feel like doubting them, though.

“It’s too bad they aren’t,” the lady says, sounding almost wistful. “I’m sure we would have been able to help them, if they were.”

“No, we couldn’t have.”

“Oh, that’s right, we couldn’t have. Because if they were—”

“And we knew about it—”

“—and did nothing to stop them—”

“Well, I mean—” The man widens his eyes dramatically. “That’d be a crime.”

Hardison and Elliott just stare.

“Valentine likes blondes,” says the lady. “Just…by the way.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Hardison manages, but internally, he’s reeling. “And you didn’t tell us, because that would mean you would know what we were here to do.”

“Exactly,” says the man. “I mean, I’d love to have been able to stop you, really, I would, but it’s all this _technical_ stuff, you know, it—it just goes right over my head. You know how us _old_ people are, and I would have tried to stop you, if I had only known.”

“Right,” Elliot says slowly. “And—of course—that would be impossible. Wouldn’t it, sir?”                

“Sir?” the man echoes, the picture of innocence.

But Elliott’s got that look in his eye that means he won’t answer any questions when Hardison tries to bug him about it later, unless Nate’s the one asking.

“Yessir,” he says. “Lieutenant, maybe?”

Come on, there’s no way he can get that from the way the guy stirs his coffee or whatever.

But the man smiles, the way Archibald Leach smiles, the way Quinn smiles, the way Sterling and Sophie and sometimes even Nate smiles when he thinks no one’s looking.

“Lieutenant,” he says quietly. “Those _were_ the days.”

The lady gives his arm a little squeeze, and he glances at her and smiles the way Nate and Sophie smile at each other, so that his face seems to have forgotten the colder smile from before.

They pay for their meal up front, and the bell over the door chimes as they leave.

Hardison and Elliot leave not long after that—a new lead to run down, as soon as they get back to Nate’s, and a new plan to go over, so they’ve got to hurry.

“This could work,” Hardison’s saying, thinking out loud. “This might actually work.”

“Look at you,” says Elliott. “What, are you on the jazz or something?”

Hardison says, “What?”

“Never mind,” says Elliot. “It’s just a joke.”

And so they leave, and Hardison doesn’t ask.

               


End file.
